關於 race in southeast asia ，我們在網路上蒐集到這些相關的討論、資訊與評價

My interpretation of TIME TIMEPieces project theme ‘Building A Better Future’ is expressed through a little girl character where she looks toward a future with the option to begin her adventure with either Fiat Money or Crypto.

This little girl is from Borneo, and the mountain in the background is Mount Kinabalu, the highest mountain in Borneo. Lush forests surround the mountain, and the land is rich and healthy. The banknote in the centre reflects a changing perception of currencies and their role in our time. This banknote is issued by Memebank, a parody central bank that pokes fun at fiat currencies with crypto meme culture. Hidden in this banknote are “easter eggs” such as morse codes, a very pixelated “decentralised” text, and even smaller pixelated icons.

This NFT represents my aspiration and hope for a future where little girls are empowered to choose their adventures and determine their own choices - a world that celebrates nature, technology, art and the human race (little icons within the banknote representing these four elements through icons of a rocket, a cat, a kite and a human). This piece is also a special tribute to little girls from Borneo and Southeast Asia. 💚

Find out more at NFT.time.com! @time
I can’t thank the TIME team enough for this incredible opportunity, and also for my team who worked on this project with me!

Interview with A Founder: Conor McLaughlin (Co-founder of 99.co)

By David Wu (AppWorks Associate)

Conor McLaughlin was previously the Co-founder and CTO of 99.co, the real estate marketplace in Singapore and Indonesia. He spent six and a half years at the startup, whose backers include Sequoia Capital, 500 Startups, and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, helping to grow it into a $100 million company. As a member of AppWorks Accelerator #21, he is currently working on his next big project, a yet-to-be-named language learning startup.

【What advice do you have for first-time founders?】

First, you need to decide: do I want to run a sprint or a marathon? For a sprint, you may be open to acquisition from the beginning, delay non-startup aspects of your life, give yourself two years where you drop everything to test an idea, choose to raise more money earlier on and thus be more diluted, or do anything else that implies a shorter time horizon. Typically 1-5 years - this can lead to a major boon in a short period of time if executed well. If you decide you are in the sprinting business, you will most likely be pushed toward binary outcomes because of how many investors and employees you have on your cap table. As a first-time founder, you need to be clear with yourself on what you are willing to put on the line. As Reid Hoffman says, it’s like jumping off a cliff and building a plane on the way down… hopefully you build a plane in time.

If you are running a marathon, you are deciding that your competitive advantage is consistency over intensity. You are in this for 10, 15 years. With this time horizon, you will realize you need ways to metabolize stress and maintain emotional, spiritual, and mental health. You need to maintain relationships with friends, family, and romantic partners. When you are looking at this 10 year period, you realize the people around you can only put up with so much. Unfortunately, while work is something people can generally bounce back from, there are many things in life where you cannot - an example is your relationship with your partner. If you’re going to run a marathon, you need to be clear with yourself about what time you have for other aspects of your life and what time you have for your company. Eventually you need to learn what the right speed is where you can run as long as possible. It’s amazing how often it is that those people that keep going, assuming you have chosen the right problem to solve, eventually find daylight. Part of that is just lasting long enough.

Second, you need to revisit and continually ask yourself: should I still be running a sprint or a marathon? Circumstances change. Maybe you sprinted for the first two years to secure interesting results and funding; now it's time to transition to a marathon and clean up the life debt a bit. Or inversely, maybe you're finally leaving the trough of sorrow and it's time to sprint for a bit. Most founders will be in a long distance race with periodic sprinting. From my observation, founders most often stop because of two reasons: They either A) run out of money or B) run out of energy. There’s plenty of advice out there for scenario A (hint: don’t). But in my experience, scenario B is far more pernicious and dangerous to would-be successful founders. If you are in a marathon but fail to pace yourself and run it like one long sprint, you are unlikely to make it to the end.

Much founder advice speaks to this: Don’t let your startup make you fat. Exercise 5-10% of the time. Pick up a hobby outside of your startup. Go home for holidays. All of it leads back to one thing: You need to take care of yourself. Because injury will be far worse for your progress than being a little slower. “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast”, as the US Navy Seals say. This is surprisingly difficult advice for intrinsically motivated founders to follow, because in the event of failure, it makes them vulnerable to the thought, “Well, you didn’t work hard enough.” But for those that already have the hustle, your job is to avoid the moment of epiphany where you look in the mirror and think, “This isn’t worth it.”

All founders will have to sacrifice some things. The point is to not sacrifice everything. It will make you more resilient. Not less. It will give you the space to see situations more objectively and make better decisions. And most importantly, it will let you love what you do because it will remind you that the work isn’t just in service of yourself, it’s in the service of others. I do not think you can judge hard work over a day, or even a year, but I do think you can judge hard work over 5-10 years. Hard work is not just about the next 1-2 months. There will be times when you need to run as fast as possible, but if that is happening all the time you are probably not being smart about the situation. So don’t hurt yourself, be consistent, keep disciplined, and keep going.

Lastly, focus on your metaskills. Public speaking, reading, writing - skills applied in every aspect of your life. Generally what they reflect is learning how to think better. As a founder you need to think about - how can I think more clearly, be more creative, rigorous, analytical? As Warren Buffett and others have said: I have never seen a successful person that did not read as often as they could. Actual books and long form scare a lot of people. That’s your competitive advantage. Read blog posts from smart people, follow smart people on Twitter, listen to podcasts. Always be focused on how you can develop yourself to think better. Fostering the habit of improving your thinking will foster discipline in yourself. And discipline will let you turn that rigorous thinking into action.

【I imagine running the “race” has been especially tough this year. How have you gotten through 2020?】

I have leaned on routine and community. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to foster discipline in myself. I make my bed every morning, meditate every morning, make sure that I go to the gym 3-4 times a week. There’s so much uncertainty in both the world and the entrepreneurial space. Keeping certain things consistent gives me a spine to my life that I can fall back on. If I’m not feeling well, my discipline takes over and I’ll go to the gym. That helps me relieve stress - falling back to routine and having some mainstays of consistency and structure.

And community - it’s been the big mental health zeitgeist of this year. Everyone is recognizing that without the people around us, our mental health diminishes. Joining AppWorks was very intentional so I could surround myself with like-minded people who could question me, hold me accountable, and inspire me. And also just forming personal connections where I felt that I was still taking care of my mental health by connecting with others. Being a founder is an incredibly lonely journey. In the early days, there’s not a lot of people around. Later, when you do hire lots of people, you need to be the boss, the leader - for certain things, you can’t tell the employees everything, and even if you do, there will always be a bit of distance. You need people to relate to - people want to be seen for who they are, and appreciated for what they give. When you are a founder, sometimes it’s hard to feel that you are seen. So I intentionally put myself in situations where I can be inspired, be held accountable, and more importantly connect with others, and feel that I’m not alone. And that me and my co-founders are part of a communal journey with those around us.

【When you talk about how to run the race, I get the sense that you’re drawing from previous experiences and, perhaps, mistakes. What are the mistakes you’ve made in your founder journey and the takeaways?】

I think you could take a calendar, point to a random week, and we could list out all the mistakes from that week (laughs). I do subscribe to Steve Jobs’ philosophy: mistakes will happen, but mistakes happening means we are making decisions. Not making decisions is perhaps the biggest mistake. It’s often the reason for frustration, loss of speed, loss of momentum - so many of the issues you encounter in startups. Not making enough mistakes is probably the #1 mistake that I’ve made.

Second, going back to my advice to first-time founders, is not understanding what game I’m playing. Not understanding that all the money in the world is not going to be worth it if your spouse or partner decides to leave you because you have relegated them to a second-class citizen in your life. I think I forgot that at points. There is more to life than just the company.

Third, be careful about who you choose to work with. At minimum, if you’re doing a standard 8-9 hours at the office five times a week, that’s a lot of time with those people. You want to like the people that you work with - you want to know they’re high integrity, you want to respect their values, and you want to have common values. Choosing the right people that give you energy rather than take it away just makes running the marathon so much easier.

【We welcome all AI, Blockchain, or Southeast Asia founders to join AppWorks Accelerator: https://bit.ly/3r4lLR8 】

Southeast Asia hit a new milestone recently as Facebook announced its investment in Indonesian ride-hailing unicorn Gojek. Although many other American tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Expedia have long been active in SEA, this investment marks the social media giant's very first foray into the region.

In terms of ride sharing, it's a two-horse race with Gojek still maintaining an edge on its home turf in Indonesia, while Grab continues to dominate in markets outside of Indonesia.

Fintech has always been a key component of ride sharing startups in attempt to develop deeper customer loyalty (for riders and drives), increase stickiness, and improve profitability with higher margin products like financing, insurance, or payments. And the recent move by Facebook (and Paypal) may just help Gojek tip the scales in its favor.

Its digital payments arm Gopay is now the most widely used e-wallet in Indonesia and was instrumental in helping Gojek build up early traction in the second largest cash-based country in the world.

Widespread penetration of Facebook's social media platform, along with messaging services like WhatsApp and messenger, may help Gopay further expand its reach, and together with Paypal's online payment portals, offer a truly seamless, value-added experience for its users.

Of course, taking American money is not without potential risks down the line. As evidenced by its recent $5.7B investment in India-based Reliance Jio, Facebook will stop at nothing for global domination and may very well strike up similar partnerships with competitors in the space.

All-in-all, the SEA ecosystem has evolved tremendously in the last few years, and its refreshing to see homegrown startups eliciting the attention and interest of international stakeholders, surely signaling a new stage of maturity that will hopefully bring more resources, talent, and opportunities to the region.

-Jun Wakabayashi
Analyst, AppWorks

AppWorks Accelerator is now accepting applications for AW#21. If you're a startup looking to join Greater Southeast Asia's strongest founder community, be sure to apply: https://bit.ly/2YaYgbi

This is a message that I would like to share with the world.
A message from Taiwan.

Hi there, this is Vivi from Taiwan.
There’s something that I would like to share with you.

With more than 1.7 million confirmed cases and 100 thousand deaths around the world, the COVID19 pandemic outbreak has become the most challenging global health crisis of our time. This is an unprecedented time that has affected the lives of everyone in our global community, regardless of race, gender, culture, or skin colour.

At this defining moment in history, cooperation will bring upon the relief and clarity needed to triumph over a common threat facing humankind. In this fight, I, as a citizen of this global community, believe health is a fundamental human right that is inherent to all human beings. ‘Health For All, Leave No One Behind’ is a guiding principle of all health professionals, as well as a message that has resonated with us Taiwanese people through the toughest of times. In 2003, the SARS outbreak devastated my home country. Left isolated and marginalised by the WHO in the fight against SARS, we learned, through fearful uncertainty, how to tenaciously combat pandemics. But most importantly, the people of Taiwan experienced firsthand what it felt like to be left behind. Taiwan, despite just being miles off the coast of China, has effectively managed the spread of coronavirus in our country. And it is the belief that we should ‘leave no one behind’ that motivates us to play our role in the global community.

Taiwan can help, and Taiwan is helping.

In the past few weeks, the Taiwanese government has donated more than 10 million surgical masks to the United States, Europe, Southeast Asia, India, Central America and South America. Other medical supplies are also finding their way to all continents around the globe. Since the very first days of the outbreak, the Taiwanese government has devoted itself to fighting this pandemic. Through information transparency, quick response, early deployment and the effective use of big data, the functions of our society continue without interruption. To share our knowledge on COVID-19 with the world, we created virtual forums, participated by numerous countries, of our successful and internationally recognised public health policies. Our government and research centres have also teamed up with the Czech Republic, European Union and the United States in sharing tactics and technology and collaborating on the development of vaccines and rapid test kits. Finally, we have worked with different governments in analysing the economic, social and psychological impact of the epidemic and related isolation measures.

Taiwan cares, and Taiwan helps.

This virus can tear up the world, but it will not shake the foundations of humanity’s values. For a worldwide pandemic that does not discriminate based on borders and nationalities, it is crucial that we, in times of a crisis like this, stay stronger together.

Taiwan never forgets her friends from around the world.
We are part of this global team and we are in solidarity with the rest of the world.
Taiwan stands with you.


這是一個我想要傳遞給世界的訊息。
一則，來自臺灣的訊息。

嗨，今天過得好嗎？
我是來自臺灣的Vivi。讓我跟你分享一件事，好嗎？

COVID19爆發至今，已在全球造成超過一百七十萬人確診、十萬人犧牲。這次的疫情，是這個世代面臨最大的全球衛生危機。這是一場影響了全人類，不論種族、性別、文化、與膚色，我們都必須共同面對的，前所未有的挑戰。

在這個歷史性的浪尖上，並肩合作、共同抗疫，才能夠引領我們贏得這場對抗病毒的戰役。身為全球公民的一員，我始終相信「健康，是每一個人都享有的基本人權」。而「全民均健」，不只是每一個醫衛人員所堅守的價值，更是在這樣艱難的時刻中，臺灣人民付諸實行的信念。在2003年時，我們經歷了SARS的考驗，並學會了如何在前方情形未知、還被WHO排除在外的情況下，仍舊堅韌地戰勝傳染病。但最重要的是，臺灣人比誰都了解孤軍奮戰的心情。而在這次的疫情當中，臺灣即便緊鄰中國，依然有效地阻擋了疫情擴散。同時也正是「全民均健，不可遺落任何一個人」的信念，引領臺灣始終積極地在國際社會中，貢獻一己之力。

臺灣可以幫忙，我們也正在全力幫忙。

在過去幾週內，臺灣捐贈了超過一千萬個醫療口罩至美國、歐洲、東南亞、印度及中南美洲。同時，也有許多捐贈給各大洲的防疫醫療器材，正在運送與安排當中。自從疫情爆發的第一天起，我們的政府就全體動員，合力對抗傳染病。經由公開透明的疫情資訊、超前部署、快速溝通與反應、以及大數據運用等防疫策略，臺灣社會才得以繼續維持日常生活不受影響。而我們也開始舉辦線上會議，與許多國家分享我們的防疫經驗——臺灣的防疫成果，是國際有目共睹的。我們的政府與醫衛研究機構，也跟捷克、歐盟、美國合作，不僅分享防疫策略、技術，也開始共同研發疫苗與快篩。近期，我們也跟他國政府共同合作，研究此次疫情所帶來在經濟、社會與心理健康上的影響。

臺灣因為在乎，所以我們實際幫忙。

病毒或許可以分裂這個世界，但沒辦法撼動人類最根深蒂固堅守的價值。面對著這個跨越邊界、國籍的傳染病危機，這個世界必須攜手合作，共同強大。

臺灣從來沒有忘記我們全球的友邦與朋友。
我們是這個世界的一份子，也會持續跟全世界站在一起，抵禦病毒。
臺灣與你並肩。

#COVID19 #TWStandsWithU #TaiwanCanHelp #TaiwanIsHelping

—
影片製作 Video/ Vivi Lin
內容撰寫 Script/ Vivi Lin, Roy Cheng
相片版權 PC/ Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Taiwan)
（照片翻攝至外交部、Taiwan in the Netherlands、Taiwan in EU and Belgium、Taiwan in Holy See、Taiwan in Poland、AIT Facebook & Twitter，如有侵權敬請告知）
特別感謝 Special Thanks/ MOFA (Taiwan) and NEX Foundation

更多臺灣防疫成果國際分享，請見外交部專區https://bit.ly/mofacovid19

*Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this video are those of the authors. 影片內容僅代表作者本身之觀點。*